ShakespeareFlix

Alexander Barnett's King Lear , which was released worldwide in October, is also available in a fifteen-episode version on Vimeo . Here's a preview.  

In his 2012 Viola , Argentine director Matías Piñeiro played games with Twelfth Night . In his new film, Hermia and Helena , he riffs on A Midsummer Night's Dream . Here's a review from Variety  and a clip that gives some sense of the film. Camila/Helena (Agustina Muñoz) drives a truck while Carmen/Hermia (Maria Villa) makes out with her boyfriend Leo/Lysander (Julian Larquier).  

Thou art a Monument, without a tomb, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

Hungarians used to have the poets Sándor Petőfi and Endre Ady on the their money, and, before they switched to the Euro, the Irish had Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce. The Scots have put Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott on their pounds, and Jane Austen graces the British £10 note. My fellow Americans, let's replace the Indian killer Andrew Jackson with Emily Dickinson on the $20. Image from Coin World . The Brits now have three different £2 coins to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's (physical) death: one for tragedies, one for histories, and one for comedies (as in the First Folio, the comedies presumably include the romances). The history coin's design may allude to Richard II's "hollow crown" speech (3.2.151-66), in which he imagines death as a king, holding court inside the English crown. That scene is too busy for a coin, and a dagger in a crown perfectly captures the spirit of the passage and the...

The Guardian reports: Shakespeare’s Globe theatre is to mark the 400th anniversary of the bard’s death by turning London’s South Bank into a huge pop-up cinema showing 37 new films – one for each of Shakespeare’s plays.  Some 2.5 miles (4km) of the Thames path between Westminster Bridge and London Bridge will be given over to 37 screens placed in order of when the play was written.  . . . [E]ach film will only run for 10 minutes – repeated on a loop throughout 23 and 24 April. The films will be made "on location: Hamlet will be shot in Elsinore (Helsingør) in Denmark, Cleopatra in front of the Pyramids in Egypt, and Romeo and Juliet in Verona in Italy." Not all locations have been decided but the Globe's director, Dominic Dromgoole, "said several actors in the frame for parts are already strongly arguing for sun-drenched Barbados to stand in for the island in The Tempest ." Shakespeare's Globe on London's South Bank Image from Urban Design L...

Shakespeare's grave. His skull is probably in there. In the Telegraph , Emily Gosden reports on how "clergymen attempting to solve a centuries-old mystery over the identity of a lone skull found in a Worcestershire church vault have been thwarted by a senior church lawyer - who has barred them from carrying out DNA testing." The clergymen wanted to test a local legend that the skull was "stolen from the playwright’s tomb in Stratford as part of a wager set by the art historian Horace Walpole in the 1700s." Like claims about a newly discovered Shakespeare portrait , this story seems far-fetched, which is why the church lawyer "sided with prominent Shakespeare scholars who have rubbished" it.

(Image from The Sunday Times ) Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Frui t and Sexing the Cherry , has written a version of The Winter's Tale  called The Gap of Tim e as part of a Random House series of Shakespeare retellings. In an interview with Rachel Martin on NPR , Winterson explains why she chose The Winter's Tale : "[I]t's got an abandoned baby in it, and I am one, and, you know, abandoned babies in literature do pretty well — not just in literature, in popular culture, Superman, Spider-Man, Han Solo in the Star Wars trilogy, he doesn't know who his father is, famously." (Whoops, she means Luke Skywalker of course.)

In the Guardian , Dalya Alberge describes the research of David Fallow, a former banker who "has spent years studying the Shakespeare family’s wealth, poring over documentary evidence from a time when 'wool was to the English economy what oil is to Saudi Arabia today.'" Fallow believes that, contrary to the accepted story, Shakespeare's father wasn't a business failure who impoverished his family: “John Shakespeare was a national-level wool dealer, and legal research, coupled to analysis of the wool market, proves this. The Shakespeare family never fell into poverty.” Shakespeare scholar Paul Edmondson says that Fallow's research suggests that Shakespeare's family money, rather than his show-biz success, explains how he could afford “remarkably large purchases of land in the Stratford area.” An early eighteenth-century sketch of the New Place, which Shakespeare bought in 1597 and left in his will to his daughter Susanna.

This week, Empire released these new posters for the Justin Kurzel's Macbeth with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard.

The BBC reports that "A 400-year-old botany book contains what could be the only known portrait of Shakespeare made in his lifetime, according to an academic expert." The book is John Gerard's 1598 Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes , and the "portrait" is in a corner of the elaborate title page, which is by William Rogers, one of the best-known Elizabethan engravers. The expert, "botanist and historian Mark Griffiths," writes regularly for Country Life magazine, which is publishing his claims.

Mather Brown,  Richard II resigning the Crown to Bolingbroke (1801) CBC News  reports that Remains of the Day director James Ivory will shoot his Richard II , starring Tom Hiddleston, in 3D:  After watching  Avatar  in 3D, Ivory said he thought: "This could be useful. . . .  I think if you're going to do something set in the 14th century, in period, in 3D, it will be like something from Mars practically, I think. It will be strange and effective." 

Today Christian Borle got a well-deserved Tony nomination for his hilarious turn as a buff, showboating, plagiarizing, codpiece-twerking Shakespeare in Something Rotten .

Entertainment Weekly has posted a clip from the new Cymbeline movie. Ethan Hawke's Iachimo finishes telling Dakota Johnson's Imogen of her husband's infidelities, and then suggests that she get revenge by sleeping with him. IACHIMO . . . [D]iseased ventures . . . [and] such boiled stuff As well might poison poison! Be revenged Or she that bore you was no queen, and you Recoil from your great stock. IMOGEN Revenged! How should I be revenged? If this be true— . . . How should I be revenged? IACHIMO . . . I dedicate myself to your sweet pleasure, More noble than that runagate [from] your bed, And will continue fast to your affection, . . . Let me my service tender on your lips. Imogen rejects him and says she will tell her father what he's done: IMOGEN . . . I do condemn mine ears that have So long attended thee. . . . Pisanio! The king my father shall be made acquainted Of thy assault [and] if he shall think it fit, A saucy stranger in his court . ...

For years I've said we need more films of Shakespeare's romances, which are perfect for this era of fantasy spectacles. Those films often look great because of CGI, a technology that works well for Shakespearean romance, as Julie Taymor proved with her 2010 Tempest . We could use similar treatments of Pericles and The Winter's Tale . Cymbeline , with its evil queen, pagan god, clash of armies, decapitation, and far-flung settings in the first-century British court, corrupt Rome, and misty Wales would make an excellent Game-of-Thrones -style epic. Instead, Michael Almeyreda is giving us a contemporary crime thriller, with the Britons as bikers and the Romans as cops. We lose the original setting's sweep but gain a gritty immediacy that should work well for the play's jealousy and war stories. Unlike the trailer for 2013 Romeo and Juliet —which brought high hopes crashing to the ground with Julian Fellowes's ridiculous, spell-it-all-out dialogue—the Cymb...

ComingSoon.net  has released the first poster for the new Cymbeline movie. Apparently, the title has been changed back from Anarchy (thank goodness).

In today's New York Times , Ben Brantley  raves about a radical revision of The Tempest by "the most truly revolutionary troupe in town," the Italian Motus Theater Company: Motus is . . . channeling the pent-up lifeblood of two slaves out of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” chafing at their bondage to an imperial magician named Prospero.  Ariel and Caliban, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.   “Nella Tempesta,” which runs through Sunday at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa, is a full-throated cry to the young and disaffected to get off their collective duffs, shake off their shackles and do something. Conceived and directed by Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande, this production turns a cast of six and an assortment of blankets into an 80-minute youthquake that seems likely to leave even cynical audience members shaken and stirred.

Tamora (Indira Varma) pleads for her son's life in the Globe's production of Titus Andronicus .  Image from The Independent . The Telegraph reports that the Globe's  Titus Andronicus will be shown in movie theaters in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the US as part of the Globe on Screen program. Hannah Furness  writes that the original production was "so bloody it caused more than 100 audience members to faint or leave during its theatre run."

The First Folio discovered in the  Saint-Omer public library, near Calais. Image from the New York Times . The recent discovery of a First Folio in France made many of us wonder how many copies lie neglected in libraries or buried at the bottom of trunks. On The Conversation , one of world's foremost Folio experts, Eric Rasmussen , says that a new copy seems to turn up around every six years. He goes on to tell some amusing tales about copies that have been lost and recovered: During the Great Depression, a copy was filched from Williams College by a New York shoe salesman (who ultimately returned it in a drunken stupor because he was worried that it might fall into the hands of Adolf Hitler).  In 2008, an unemployed, self-described ‘fantasist’ named Raymond Scott walked into Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library with a copy that he claimed to have acquired from one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards. The First Folio in question turned out to have been st...

CNN recently broadcast some short clips of Jennifer Lawrence playing Desdemona in a high-school production of Othello . She describes Othello's command that she dismiss Emilia (4.3.11-13) and sings a bit of the "Willow" song (4.3.38-51).  

Puritan book burning (1643). In Wonkette , "Doktor Zoom" describes the right-wing radio host Kevin Swanson 's Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West . Swanson believes that [y]oung, impressionable minds can “cut themselves” on the “great books,” and sometimes the wounds get infected. This is usually how we lose our best and brightest young students to the other side, generation after generation.  According to Swanson, one of those books is Shakespeare's Complete Works . He worries that the sonnets' homoeroticism "introduces dangerous gender confusion into the minds of men" and that Shakespeare's "fundamental worldview was not openly and obviously Christian." Swanson finds Macbeth particularly distressing since [i]n the familiar scene, Lady Macbeth attempts to wash away the bloodguilt with water, but to no avail. No mention is made of the blood of Christ. Not surprisingly, the central position of Jesus ... is complete...